Fire and ice: Severe spring storms crush a Sugar Land gas station and set an area oil facility ablaze

A Sugar Land gas station is picking up the pieces after Saturday afternoon's severe weather caused the roof of the convenience store to collapse.

While potent storms downed power lines and flooded city streets across the region, residents to the west of Houston faced additional troubles with hail measuring as large as one inch in diameter.

"Huge balls of hail were making the roof come down, so we all came out," gas station owner Shams Harirani told KHOU Ch. 11. "Then, when I was talking to 911, everything fell down."

The weight of the ice and rain water crushed the store while Harirani was on the line with emergency technicians. Luckily all customers and employees had evacuated the building in time and no injuries were reported.

According to Debbie Helvy with the National Weather Service office in League City, southwest Houston bore the brunt of the flooding as more than eight inches of rain in and around Keegan's Bayou near Beltway 8.

But weather-related troubles took place throughout the area. Around 3 p.m. Saturday, firefighters quickly extinguished a lightning-sparked blaze at a Cypress oil storage facility. One of the estimated 45,000 CenterPoint Energy customers without power, Kindred Hospital East Houston temporarily relocated patients to nearby medical facilities.